Those of you who follow me on twitter (all of you) are aware that my phone broke on new years eve.
I did not drop it. I did not sit on it. I didn't even leave it in my pants pocket and wash it on accident.
I sent a text message, slid the keyboard into the phone, locked it and turned off the screen. A few moments later I reached for my phone to send another message and the screen would not turn on. I pressed the button alternating praying to and cursing the phone gods that this had not happened.
It had.
I spent the rest of the night trying to revive my phone because it is a part of my brain - Scott Adams wrote about this earlier this year. I resigned myself to the fact that it would not work and took the lifeless phone in to the T-mobile store the next day. The guy at the store told me that my phone was not dead but there was a screen connection error which rendered the phone useless.
This was the third Touch Pro 2 I have had in the 16 months since buying it. I received my now broken device in august so this one made it to a little over four months of use. By now I am out of the warranty period and did not buy insurance on the phone, stupid me thinking a product would last.
Which means I am now in the market for a new phone. I've been in and out of t-mobile stores trying to figure out the best phone to buy. Which phone to get bound to, by the law, for the next two years of my life. I increasingly use my phone more and more so the quality of the product and operating system are pretty important. The issue with the t-mobile phones is all of them feel pretty crappy.
The highest quality phones they sell are still molded out of cheep plastic. Phones that t-mobile proudly announces are marked down from their egregiously high retail prices. I know there is no way that those phones could possibly hold up for two years. Even the Razr feels more substantial than many of these "high quality" smart phones. It gets to the root of what is wrong with a lot of cell phone manufacturers.
We have seen from the iPhone and the Razr before it, that people will pay a premium for a product that feels and looks like a quality product. Great internals are fine but the product needs to be able to hold up to regular use for people to enjoy the power under the hood. If something is supposed to be high quality make it high quality or stop kidding yourself.
This isn't really about getting into advertising at all but maybe it could help if you're ever involved in decision making about a product. There's really two lessons in this piece:
- Make products that are worth buying. Bernbach said, "A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad."
- Always, and I mean always, buy the insurance on your crappy phone. Because most phones just aren't made to last two years - or in my case 6 months.
Hopefully T-Mobile will announce something great at CES but I've learned to stop expecting much from them.